The Helper

If you were Apple, what tricks would you utilize to increase the sales of your latest product?

If you know corporations, you’d know they use any possible trick they can as a generality to increase their profit: think of how huge a factor it would make in the sale of new iPhones if the old ones became slower.

People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model.

Now, a Harvard University study has done what any person with Google Trends could do, and pointed out that Google searches for “iPhone slow” spiked multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time.

It was well past midnight when Michael Abrams, Claire Bedbrook and Ravi Nath crept into the Caltech lab where they were keeping their jellyfish. They didn't bother switching on the lights, opting instead to navigate the maze of desks and equipment by the pale blue glow of their cellphones. The students hadn't told anyone that they were doing this. It wasn't forbidden, exactly, but they wanted a chance to conduct their research without their PhD advisers breathing down their necks.

“When you start working on something totally crazy, it's good to get data before you tell anybody,” Abrams said.

The “totally crazy” undertaking in question: an experiment to determine whether jellyfish sleep.

It had all started when Bedbrook, a graduate student in neurobiology, overheard Nath and Abrams mulling the question over coffee. The topic was weird enough to make her stop at their table and argue.

“Of course not,” she said. Scientists still don't fully know why animals need to snooze, but research has found that sleep is a complex behavior associated with memory consolidation and REM cycles in the brain. Jellyfish are so primitive they don't even have a brain — how could they possibly share this mysterious trait?

The team was jointly led by Dr. Matthias Gromeier, a professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, and Prof. Smita Nair, who is an immunologist in the Department of Surgery.

The new research - which is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine - shows how a modified poliovirus enables the body to use its own resources to fight off cancer. The modified virus bears the name of recombinant oncolytic poliovirus (PVS-RIPO).

PVS-RIPO has been in clinical trials since 2011 and preliminary results have offered hope to patients with one of the most aggressive forms of brain tumor: recurrent glioblastoma. So, the researchers set out to investigate more deeply how exactly PVS-RIPO works.

Explaining the rationale behind their research endeavor, Dr. Gromeier says, "Knowing the steps that occur to generate an immune response will enable us to rationally decide whether and what other therapies make sense in combination with poliovirus to improve patient survival."

Sleep deprivation -- typically administered in controlled, inpatient settings -- rapidly reduces symptoms of depression in roughly half of depression patients, according the first meta-analysis on the subject in nearly 30 years, from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Partial sleep deprivation (sleep for three to four hours followed by forced wakefulness for 20-21 hours) was equally as effective as total sleep deprivation (being deprived of sleep for 36 hours), and medication did not appear to significantly influence these results. The results are published today in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Although total sleep deprivation or partial sleep deprivation can produce clinical improvement in depression symptoms within 24 hours, antidepressants are the most common treatment for depression. Such drugs typically take weeks or longer to experience results, yet 16.7 percent of 242 million U.S. adults filled one or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in 2013. The findings of this meta-analysis hope to provide relief for the estimated 16.1 million adults who experienced a major depressive episode in 2014.

Previous studies have shown rapid antidepressant effects from sleep deprivation for roughly 40-60 percent of individuals, yet this response rate has not been analyzed to obtain a more precise percentage since 1990 despite more than 75 studies since then on the subject.

New research helps to explain why the belief in election fraud is common in the United States, even though research has failed to find convincing evidence that it is a problem.

The study, published in the scientific journal Political Research Quarterly, found evidence that conspiratorial thinking and motivated partisan reasoning both have a strong influence on the belief in election-related conspiracy theories.

“My coauthor, Joseph Parent, came to me with the idea of studying conspiracy theories,” said Joseph E. Uscinski of the University of Miami. “When we got into it, there had been little systematic analysis of why people believed conspiracy theories, and what the consequences of those beliefs were. I have remained interested in the topic because it is a fun one to study most importantly, but also because it is so relevant to our current politics.”

The researchers used a survey of 1,230 Americans, conducted before and after the 2012 presidential election, to examine why some people believed widespread fraud had swung the outcome.

Before the election, 62 percent of the participants said they believed that if their preferred candidate lost, voter fraud would be involved. But that percentage dropped down to 39 percent after the election. The drop was largely correlated with partisanship.

The United States is in the midst of a major drug epidemic. Stories continue to roll in daily about the lives claimed by prescription and non-prescription drug overdoses. The numbers are staggering. Opioids alone (including prescription pain killers and street heroin) killed more than 33,000 people in 2015, 90+ Americans every single day, and more than any year on record according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). From 2000 to 2015, half a million people died from prescription drug overdoses.

“The potential for addiction and health risks associated with using multiple scheduled drugs places additional direct monetary and health costs on patients and healthcare systems due to an increased number of side effects, risky drug interactions, dependency, and overdose” stated University of New Mexico researchers Jacob Miguel Vigil and Sarah See Stith, of a new study titled, Effects of Legal Access to Cannabis on Scheduled II-V Drug Prescriptions, which will be soon released in an upcoming issue of the Journal of American Medical Directors Association.

The study resulted from insights provided by co-investigator Dr. Anthony Reeve, a pain specialist from the Industrial Rehabilitation Pain Clinics, Albuquerque, N.M. and also one of the first physicians to authorize the use of cannabis for patients with chronic pain in the state of New Mexico.

Reeve observed a number of his patients coming back to see him, not only less frequently after enrolling in the New Mexico Medical...

Playing tackle football under the age of 12 exposes children to repetitive head impacts that may double their risk of developing behavioral problems and triple their chances of suffering depression later in life, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature magazine’s journal, Translational Psychiatry.

The research, conducted by Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, provides the most powerful evidence to date that playing contact football before age 12 may cause brain changes throughout life.

“This study adds to growing research suggesting that incurring repeated head impacts through tackle football before the age of 12 can lead to a greater risk for short- and long-term neurological consequences,” said Michael Alosco, the study’s lead author, a post-doctoral fellow at Boston University School of Medicine.

The consequences include behavioral and mood impairments such as depression and apathy, the study suggests. The research was supported by a variety of sources, including the National Institutes of Health and a grant from the Concussion Legacy Foundation.

There’s a good chance that you’ve watched a popular music video from Vevo, either via YouTube, Vevo’s website or its mobile app.

Most popular music artists release their videos through Vevo these days. The company – a joint venture between Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Alphabet Inc and Abu Dhabi Media – has taken the position that MTV and MuchMusic used to have in delivering music videos to the general public.

Vevo has secured about $200 million USD in advertising revenue this year, on the strength of the tremendous popularity of videos from artists such as Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Rihanna.

Hackers have successfully breached CCleaner’s security to inject malware into the app and distribute it to millions of users. Security researchers at Cisco Talos discovered that download servers used by Avast (the company that owns CCleaner) were compromised to distribute malware inside CCleaner. “For a period of time, the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.33 being distributed by Avast also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner,” says the Talos team.

CCleaner has been downloaded more than 2 billion times according to Avast, making it a popular target for hackers. Dubbed “crap cleaner,” it’s designed to wipe out cookies and offer some web privacy protections. 2.27 million users have been affected by the attack, and Avast Piriform believes it was able to prevent the breach harming customers. “Piriform believes that these users are safe now as its investigation indicates it was able to disarm the threat before it was able to do any harm,” says an Avast spokesperson.

This is an unusual attack as software similar to CCleaner is trusted by consumers and meant to remove “crapware” from a system. “By exploiting the trust relationship between software vendors and the users of their software, attackers can benefit from users' inherent trust in the files and web servers used to distribute updates,” says Talos.